For a widow with small children, a job at the local school should be ideal, but Hattie joins the Foundation with misgivings, to help look after the first intake of girls in the sixth form. There are problems with the teachers, and with the girls, and then a series of accidents. Determined to get at the truth Hattie's well meaning meddling threatens to expose something more terrible than she could have imagined, while, at the same time she finds her life filling with emotions she buried with her husband, and which she is not ready to feel again.